More than 40 years later, Liverpool-born Vivi is the singer with Klezmer Klub, who will be taking part in the Jewish Music Institute’s two-week long KlezFest, which starts on Sunday.

Vivi will perform songs from will sing from her band’s CD Whitechapel, mayn Vaytshepl — a collection that tells the social history of London’s East End.

It is the product of Vivi’s research into Yiddish songs. And she will also be teaching at the KlezFest’s summer school.

The 48-year-old told the Jewish Telegraph: “My grandfather and my great grandfather came from the East End and that got me interested in Yiddish and history.

“My grandmother spoke Yiddish at home, but they didn’t think Yiddish had a future.

“I learned German at school because I wanted to learn Yiddish and I was inspired to learn the language.”

The daughter of the late Judge Henry Lachs, Vivi left Liverpool to spend a gap year in Israel before reading English and drama at Birmingham University.

She later moved to London, where she still lives, to study education at Goldsmiths College.

“I come from a frum family, full of chassidic tradition,” recalled Vivi, who works in full-time education in Hackney.

She started dancing with a klezmer band 15 years ago before joining Klezmer Klub five years later.

Vivi explained: “What is interesting about the songs on the CD is that they give you snippets of social histories and politics, things that other people don’t bother writing about.

“How much baigels were and important things like prostitution and poverty.

“I sing a mixture of rowdy street songs and songs on moving political themes and most of the them written between 1890 and 1940.”

Around five years ago, Vivi spent a month in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, where many of the East End Jews originally came from.

She recalled: “I took a course in Yiddish there and it was fascinating.

“We were also taken round the old Jewish places in the city by elderly Lithuanian Jews who has fought as partisans during the Second World War.

“There is so much history behind it.

“Of course, many of these areas in eastern and central Europe have been largely eradicated.

“There are not many communities left who speak Yiddish daily, apart from a few chassidic groups around the world. The only way to understand Yiddish is to read its literature and so much of it is beautifully written.”

But, Vivi explains, Yiddish and klezmer music is not just for Jews.

She said: “We recently took part in the Secret Garden Party festival, near Cambridge, and loads of non-Jewish people were dancing, singing and joining in.”

Klezmer Klub have also played numerous times in the East End, in areas such as Bethnal Green and Arnold Circus, which used to be heavily populated Jewish areas.

“I think my dad would have been tickled pink about what I do,” said Vivi.

“He was so interested in Yiddish and its history and he would have loved it.”

* www.klezmerklub.co.uk